GREG SMITHMarch 14, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html
TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.
To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.
It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.
But this was not always the case. For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied.
I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.
When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.
Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.
How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.
What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.
Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.
It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.
It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.
These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.
When I was a first-year analyst I didn’t know where the bathroom was, or how to tie my shoelaces. I was taught to be concerned with learning the ropes, finding out what a derivative was, understanding finance, getting to know our clients and what motivated them, learning how they defined success and what we could do to help them get there.
My proudest moments in life — getting a full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about achievement. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore.
I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the trust of its clients — for very much longer.
Greg Smith is resigning today as a Goldman Sachs executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 14, 2012, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs.
Showing posts with label Goldman Sachs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Goldman Sachs. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Friday, December 23, 2011
Hank Paulson’s inside jobs
Felix Salmon Nov 29, 2011
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/11/29/hank-paulsons-inside-jobs
What on earth did Hank Paulson think his job was in the summer of 2008? As far as most of us were concerned, he was secretary of the US Treasury, answerable to the US people and to the president. But at the same time, in secret meetings, Paulson was hanging out with his old Goldman Sachs buddies, giving them invaluable information about what he was thinking in his new job.
The first news of this behavior came in October 2009, when Andrew Ross Sorkin revealed that Paulson had met with the entire board of Goldman Sachs in a Moscow hotel suite for an hour at the end of June 2008. He told them his views of the US and global economies, he previewed a market-moving speech he was about to give, and he even talked about the possibility that Lehman Brothers might blow up. Maybe it’s not so surprising that Goldman Sachs turned out to be so well positioned when Lehman did indeed do just that a few months later.
Today we learn that the Goldman meeting in Moscow was not some kind of aberration. A few weeks later, on July 28 2008, Paulson met with a who’s who of the hedge-fund world in the headquarters of Eton Park Capital Management — a fund founded by former Goldman superstar Eric Mindich.
The secretary, then 62, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into “conservatorship” — a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets…
Paulson explained that under this scenario, the common stock of the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, would be effectively wiped out…
The fund manager who described the meeting left after coffee and called his lawyer. The attorney’s quick conclusion: Paulson’s talk was material nonpublic information, and his client should immediately stop trading the shares of Washington- based Fannie and McLean, Virginia-based Freddie.
When we found out about the Moscow meeting, I asked how on earth Paulson thought such behavior was OK. But now I think he was downright pathological in giving inside information to his old Wall Street buddies. And the crazy thing is that we have no idea how many of these meetings there were, or how long they went on for — the only way that we ever find out about them is when reporters like Sorkin or Bloomberg’s Richard Teitelbaum manage to find a source who was in the meeting and is willing to talk about what happened.
Given that it’s taken two years since the release of Sorkin’s book for the Eton Park meeting to be made public, it’s fair to assume that there were other meetings, too — possibly many others. Paulson was giving inside tips to Wall Street in general, and to Goldman types in particular: exactly the kind of behavior that “Government Sachs” conspiracy theorists have been speculating about for years. Turns out, they were right.
Paulson, says Teitelbaum, “is now a distinguished senior fellow at the University of Chicago, where he’s starting the Paulson Institute, a think tank focused on U.S.-Chinese relations”. I’d take issue with the “distinguished” bit. Unless it means “distinguished by an astonishing black hole where his ethics ought to be”.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/11/29/hank-paulsons-inside-jobs
What on earth did Hank Paulson think his job was in the summer of 2008? As far as most of us were concerned, he was secretary of the US Treasury, answerable to the US people and to the president. But at the same time, in secret meetings, Paulson was hanging out with his old Goldman Sachs buddies, giving them invaluable information about what he was thinking in his new job.
The first news of this behavior came in October 2009, when Andrew Ross Sorkin revealed that Paulson had met with the entire board of Goldman Sachs in a Moscow hotel suite for an hour at the end of June 2008. He told them his views of the US and global economies, he previewed a market-moving speech he was about to give, and he even talked about the possibility that Lehman Brothers might blow up. Maybe it’s not so surprising that Goldman Sachs turned out to be so well positioned when Lehman did indeed do just that a few months later.
Today we learn that the Goldman meeting in Moscow was not some kind of aberration. A few weeks later, on July 28 2008, Paulson met with a who’s who of the hedge-fund world in the headquarters of Eton Park Capital Management — a fund founded by former Goldman superstar Eric Mindich.
The secretary, then 62, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into “conservatorship” — a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets…
Paulson explained that under this scenario, the common stock of the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, would be effectively wiped out…
The fund manager who described the meeting left after coffee and called his lawyer. The attorney’s quick conclusion: Paulson’s talk was material nonpublic information, and his client should immediately stop trading the shares of Washington- based Fannie and McLean, Virginia-based Freddie.
When we found out about the Moscow meeting, I asked how on earth Paulson thought such behavior was OK. But now I think he was downright pathological in giving inside information to his old Wall Street buddies. And the crazy thing is that we have no idea how many of these meetings there were, or how long they went on for — the only way that we ever find out about them is when reporters like Sorkin or Bloomberg’s Richard Teitelbaum manage to find a source who was in the meeting and is willing to talk about what happened.
Given that it’s taken two years since the release of Sorkin’s book for the Eton Park meeting to be made public, it’s fair to assume that there were other meetings, too — possibly many others. Paulson was giving inside tips to Wall Street in general, and to Goldman types in particular: exactly the kind of behavior that “Government Sachs” conspiracy theorists have been speculating about for years. Turns out, they were right.
Paulson, says Teitelbaum, “is now a distinguished senior fellow at the University of Chicago, where he’s starting the Paulson Institute, a think tank focused on U.S.-Chinese relations”. I’d take issue with the “distinguished” bit. Unless it means “distinguished by an astonishing black hole where his ethics ought to be”.
Friday, November 18, 2011
GOLDMAN SUX?
Giant Squid Strikes Again at Occupy Wall Street's Credit Union
Goldman Sachs Intensifies Threat on Credit Union
Greg Palast
GregPalast.com
Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, out on November 14.
What have I done? There's one angry squid out there.
Last week, Democracy Now! and The Guardian ran our story about Goldman Sachs yanking financial support from a community credit union for honoring one of its largest customers. The customer: Occupy Wall Street.
Our report so enraged Goldman that, within days, it doubled down on its attack on the little community bank.
Goldman had already demanded the return of its $5,000 payment to the Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union. Now, sources say, the trillion-dollar Wall Street mega-bank sent the following message to the not-for-profit community bank: "You will never get a dime from any bank ever again."
About those "dimes" Goldman is taking away: They come from you and me, the taxpayers who put up billions into the Troubled Asset Recovery Plan (TARP), usually known as the Bank Bail-Out Fund.
For Goldman to suck its $10 billion from the TARP trough, Goldman had to change from investment bank to commercial bank. This change makes Goldman subject to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and requires it by law to pay back a notable portion in funds for low-income communities, abandoned by the big banks.
Memo from Tim Geithner to Larry Summers
(click to enlarge)In other words, Goldman is beating up Lower East Side Peoples (which operates in Harlem and the Latino New York neighborhood known as Loisaida).
I would note that Goldman's nasty threat to cut off funding for Peoples, the credit union that is officially chartered as the bank for low income New Yorkers, came with a complaint about this reporter.
Goldman claims that Greg Palast called only one time to get Goldman's side of the story. (I called many times, as did my associate, and we left the same repeated message: I want your side of the story. Please call me and tell me if you're punishing the poor peoples' bank because they are supporting the demands of Occupy Wall Street?)
There are tens of billions of dollars at stake in the Community Reinvestment funds due from the big banks. As other banks are making noises of heeding Goldman's call to whip the uppity little credit union, an answer from Goldman becomes urgent.
So, Goldman, I'm still waiting for an answer. You've got my numbers, so just pick up a tentacle and call.
*
Chapter 12 of Vultures' Picnic, "The Generalissimo of Globalization," includes the Palast team investigation of confidential documents of meetings over years between Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and the CEOs of Goldman, Bank of America and JP Morgan.
The investigation takes the Palast crew from a dictator's shopping spree in Geneva to the Andes to Africa and back to Palast's years within the circle of a troll-like character named Milton Friedman.
Pre-order Vultures' Picnic now or donate for a signed copy.
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, which will be released on November 14 by Penguin USA.
For more information about Palast's brand new book and his book-signing events in your city, go to http://www.vulturespicnic.org/
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
Goldman Sachs Intensifies Threat on Credit Union
Greg Palast
GregPalast.com
Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, out on November 14.
What have I done? There's one angry squid out there.
Last week, Democracy Now! and The Guardian ran our story about Goldman Sachs yanking financial support from a community credit union for honoring one of its largest customers. The customer: Occupy Wall Street.
Our report so enraged Goldman that, within days, it doubled down on its attack on the little community bank.
Goldman had already demanded the return of its $5,000 payment to the Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union. Now, sources say, the trillion-dollar Wall Street mega-bank sent the following message to the not-for-profit community bank: "You will never get a dime from any bank ever again."
About those "dimes" Goldman is taking away: They come from you and me, the taxpayers who put up billions into the Troubled Asset Recovery Plan (TARP), usually known as the Bank Bail-Out Fund.
For Goldman to suck its $10 billion from the TARP trough, Goldman had to change from investment bank to commercial bank. This change makes Goldman subject to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and requires it by law to pay back a notable portion in funds for low-income communities, abandoned by the big banks.
Memo from Tim Geithner to Larry Summers
(click to enlarge)In other words, Goldman is beating up Lower East Side Peoples (which operates in Harlem and the Latino New York neighborhood known as Loisaida).
I would note that Goldman's nasty threat to cut off funding for Peoples, the credit union that is officially chartered as the bank for low income New Yorkers, came with a complaint about this reporter.
Goldman claims that Greg Palast called only one time to get Goldman's side of the story. (I called many times, as did my associate, and we left the same repeated message: I want your side of the story. Please call me and tell me if you're punishing the poor peoples' bank because they are supporting the demands of Occupy Wall Street?)
There are tens of billions of dollars at stake in the Community Reinvestment funds due from the big banks. As other banks are making noises of heeding Goldman's call to whip the uppity little credit union, an answer from Goldman becomes urgent.
So, Goldman, I'm still waiting for an answer. You've got my numbers, so just pick up a tentacle and call.
*
Chapter 12 of Vultures' Picnic, "The Generalissimo of Globalization," includes the Palast team investigation of confidential documents of meetings over years between Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and the CEOs of Goldman, Bank of America and JP Morgan.
The investigation takes the Palast crew from a dictator's shopping spree in Geneva to the Andes to Africa and back to Palast's years within the circle of a troll-like character named Milton Friedman.
Pre-order Vultures' Picnic now or donate for a signed copy.
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, which will be released on November 14 by Penguin USA.
For more information about Palast's brand new book and his book-signing events in your city, go to http://www.vulturespicnic.org/
Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Sachs Fiend
Goldman Attacks Occupy Wall Street's Non-Profit Bank When Goldman got huffy at a credit union honouring OWS and pulled its anniversary dinner funding, much more was at stake
Exclusive for The Guardian
Greg Palast
GregPalast.com
Author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores
Out November 14. With Arun Gupta, founding editor of The Occupied Wall Street Journal.
Mega-bank Goldman Sachs (assets $933 billion), has declared war on one of the smallest banks in New York (assets $30 million), the customer-owned community bank that happens to also be the banker for Friends of Liberty Plaza, Inc, also known as Occupy Wall Street. And you thought Goldman didn't care.
The trouble began three weeks ago when the occupiers suddenly found their donation buckets filling with thousands of dollars, way more than needed for their pizza dinners. Suddenly, the anti-bank protesters needed a bank. Citibank and Chase certainly wouldn't fit. So OWS opened an account at the not-for-profit Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union. Peoples has a unique federal charter - designated to open accounts for low-income folk from all over NewYork, available to those families earning less than $38,000 per year. (Disclosure: the CEO of the Peoples bank is my dearly beloved ex. But that's another story.)
Goldman Sachs had also joined up with the Peoples bank. Goldman partners reportedly earn a bit more than $38k per annum, yet Goldman's association so far was limited to giving the credit union $5,000 toward the little bank's 25th anniversary celebration dinner. Goldman's largesse was acknowledged on the dinner invites - along with the night's honoree: Occupy Wall Street.
When a Goldman exec saw its gilded name next to Occupy Wall Street, the financial giant expressed much displeasure. In fact, my sources say, Goldman threatened legal action unless the credit union gave up the $5,000 and reprinted the invite sans the Sachs moniker. Goldman Sachs did not respond to our requests for comment on the affair.
So far, it's a cute story: tiny bank uses Goldman's money to fete some tent-dwellers who are denouncing Sachs as the Giant Vampire Squid.
But there's a lot more at stake in this battle than a $5,000 donation gone wrong. Underneath, it's a battle royal for control of tens of billions of dollars in government mandated "community reinvestment" funds.
In 2008, the US Treasury handed Goldman Sachs a check for $10 billion from the Troubled Asset Recovery Program (Tarp), the bailout funds given to desperate commercial banks. A few eyebrows were raised: Goldman was not desperate, and it certainly was not a commercial bank. Yet - abracadabra! - Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson transformed investment bank Goldman into a commercial bank overnight. (Paulson's prior post was chairman of Goldman Sachs. Just saying.)
But there was a catch: Goldman would have to return a chunk of the public's billions in the form of loans for low-income customers and members of its "community", as required by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. Problem: Goldman has, it seems, no low-income customers, nor a "community". Goldman was directed to find poor people and a community and hand over some cash.
So Goldman looked down from its riverfront tower in lower Manhattan and discovered Peoples. Over 80% of Peoples member-owners have low incomes. At least 65% are Latino.
For the big money-center banks, the CRA is good deal. They pay some blood money into community banks and offload their low-income customers. Indeed, bank branches catering to the carriage trade often hustle would-be customers from housing projects out the door with an admonition to take their undesirable business to Lower East Side Peoples.
Goldman's circuits blew when the credit union's management appeared in Zuccotti Park to endorse Occupy Wall Street's call to "Move Your Money" from commercial banks to community credit unions. Heeding Peoples' and Occupy's call, 23 protesters marched to their local Citibank branches to close their accounts - and were promptly arrested.
Peoples' Chairwoman Deyarina Del Rio tells me that Peoples sees itself in agreement and alliance with the protesters' demands to radically shift the American finance system away from profit-first to people-first banking. But not with our money, seems to be Goldman's attitude. But of course, it's not Goldman's money but our money - effectively, the tax payer dollars that were supposed to come back in the form of loans in return for the Tarp bailout.
The billions of dollars in CRA funds (Citibank alone committed $115 billion over ten years) have given community banks tremendous political authority at the local level. Notably, Congresswoman Nydia Velasquez will be honored alongside Occupy Wall Street at the credit union's 3 November dinner. "We didn't mean to draw a line in the sand with Goldman," Peoples Chairman Del Rio told me, standing inside the bank's vault, the only place in the cramped back office with room to meet.
But Goldman did draw the line. And other bankers are stepping back across it, too. Capital One also pulled its name off the dinner invites.
Goldman has so far only passed out its legally-required CRA funds with an eye-dropper: the $5,000 for Peoples (now withdrawn), and a few other dabs here and there. The big cash investments from the Goldman fund are dangling, hoping to lure only those community banks and low-income funds that will dance to Goldman's tune. My sources told me that Goldman's "Urban Investment Group" representative had stated in a phone conversation that Occupy's credit union will never get another dime from any big bank, but, again, Goldman refused to speak with me to confirm or deny this.
Peoples' Del Rio dismisses such threats, but I don't. These Community Reinvestment funds ultimately come from public pockets, so why should the titans of Wall Street be allowed to bully community credit unions, which are answerable to their members, not Goldman's partners?
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, which will be released on November 14 by Penguin USA.
For more information about Palast's brand new book and his book-signing events in your city, go to http://www.vulturespicnic.org/
Exclusive for The Guardian
Greg Palast
GregPalast.com
Author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores
Out November 14. With Arun Gupta, founding editor of The Occupied Wall Street Journal.
Mega-bank Goldman Sachs (assets $933 billion), has declared war on one of the smallest banks in New York (assets $30 million), the customer-owned community bank that happens to also be the banker for Friends of Liberty Plaza, Inc, also known as Occupy Wall Street. And you thought Goldman didn't care.
The trouble began three weeks ago when the occupiers suddenly found their donation buckets filling with thousands of dollars, way more than needed for their pizza dinners. Suddenly, the anti-bank protesters needed a bank. Citibank and Chase certainly wouldn't fit. So OWS opened an account at the not-for-profit Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union. Peoples has a unique federal charter - designated to open accounts for low-income folk from all over NewYork, available to those families earning less than $38,000 per year. (Disclosure: the CEO of the Peoples bank is my dearly beloved ex. But that's another story.)
Goldman Sachs had also joined up with the Peoples bank. Goldman partners reportedly earn a bit more than $38k per annum, yet Goldman's association so far was limited to giving the credit union $5,000 toward the little bank's 25th anniversary celebration dinner. Goldman's largesse was acknowledged on the dinner invites - along with the night's honoree: Occupy Wall Street.
When a Goldman exec saw its gilded name next to Occupy Wall Street, the financial giant expressed much displeasure. In fact, my sources say, Goldman threatened legal action unless the credit union gave up the $5,000 and reprinted the invite sans the Sachs moniker. Goldman Sachs did not respond to our requests for comment on the affair.
So far, it's a cute story: tiny bank uses Goldman's money to fete some tent-dwellers who are denouncing Sachs as the Giant Vampire Squid.
But there's a lot more at stake in this battle than a $5,000 donation gone wrong. Underneath, it's a battle royal for control of tens of billions of dollars in government mandated "community reinvestment" funds.
In 2008, the US Treasury handed Goldman Sachs a check for $10 billion from the Troubled Asset Recovery Program (Tarp), the bailout funds given to desperate commercial banks. A few eyebrows were raised: Goldman was not desperate, and it certainly was not a commercial bank. Yet - abracadabra! - Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson transformed investment bank Goldman into a commercial bank overnight. (Paulson's prior post was chairman of Goldman Sachs. Just saying.)
But there was a catch: Goldman would have to return a chunk of the public's billions in the form of loans for low-income customers and members of its "community", as required by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. Problem: Goldman has, it seems, no low-income customers, nor a "community". Goldman was directed to find poor people and a community and hand over some cash.
So Goldman looked down from its riverfront tower in lower Manhattan and discovered Peoples. Over 80% of Peoples member-owners have low incomes. At least 65% are Latino.
For the big money-center banks, the CRA is good deal. They pay some blood money into community banks and offload their low-income customers. Indeed, bank branches catering to the carriage trade often hustle would-be customers from housing projects out the door with an admonition to take their undesirable business to Lower East Side Peoples.
Goldman's circuits blew when the credit union's management appeared in Zuccotti Park to endorse Occupy Wall Street's call to "Move Your Money" from commercial banks to community credit unions. Heeding Peoples' and Occupy's call, 23 protesters marched to their local Citibank branches to close their accounts - and were promptly arrested.
Peoples' Chairwoman Deyarina Del Rio tells me that Peoples sees itself in agreement and alliance with the protesters' demands to radically shift the American finance system away from profit-first to people-first banking. But not with our money, seems to be Goldman's attitude. But of course, it's not Goldman's money but our money - effectively, the tax payer dollars that were supposed to come back in the form of loans in return for the Tarp bailout.
The billions of dollars in CRA funds (Citibank alone committed $115 billion over ten years) have given community banks tremendous political authority at the local level. Notably, Congresswoman Nydia Velasquez will be honored alongside Occupy Wall Street at the credit union's 3 November dinner. "We didn't mean to draw a line in the sand with Goldman," Peoples Chairman Del Rio told me, standing inside the bank's vault, the only place in the cramped back office with room to meet.
But Goldman did draw the line. And other bankers are stepping back across it, too. Capital One also pulled its name off the dinner invites.
Goldman has so far only passed out its legally-required CRA funds with an eye-dropper: the $5,000 for Peoples (now withdrawn), and a few other dabs here and there. The big cash investments from the Goldman fund are dangling, hoping to lure only those community banks and low-income funds that will dance to Goldman's tune. My sources told me that Goldman's "Urban Investment Group" representative had stated in a phone conversation that Occupy's credit union will never get another dime from any big bank, but, again, Goldman refused to speak with me to confirm or deny this.
Peoples' Del Rio dismisses such threats, but I don't. These Community Reinvestment funds ultimately come from public pockets, so why should the titans of Wall Street be allowed to bully community credit unions, which are answerable to their members, not Goldman's partners?
Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, which will be released on November 14 by Penguin USA.
For more information about Palast's brand new book and his book-signing events in your city, go to http://www.vulturespicnic.org/
Guess who makes more than a Goldman Sachs CEO!
Robert Greenwald info@bravenew01.org
BraveNew01.org
While the growing Occupy movement targets the 1 Percent, we want to introduce you to the elite among the gang of the superrich: the war profiteers. Help give your local Occupy group the tools they need to fight corporate power by sharing our new video with them and posting it on your social networks.
War industry CEOs make tens of millions of dollars a year, putting them in the top 0.01 percent of income earners in the U.S.
Northrop Grumman CEO Wes Bush made $22.84 million last year.
Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens made $21.89 million.
Boeing CEO James McNerney: $19.4 million.
These guys use their corporations’ massive lobbying dollars to keep their job-killing gravy train rolling. Last year, their companies spent a whopping $46 million on lobbying, corrupting our politics and ensuring that their bank accounts continue to fatten at our expense. These executives are some of the main reasons why we're wasting so much on war instead of rebuilding our own nation here at home.
We have been deeply inspired by the incredible activism of the Occupy movement, so we created this new video to help highlight a piece of their messaging that's essential to getting our country back on track: We have to end wars for profit.
Help us expose these war profiteers for what they are: the 0.01 Percent. Find your local Occupy group on Facebook and ask them to show our latest video at their events and on their Livestreams. Then, visit our Facebook page to tell us how it went!
Sincerely,
Derrick Crowe, Robert Greenwald and the Brave New Foundation team
Brave New Foundation
10510 Culver Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
BraveNew01.org
While the growing Occupy movement targets the 1 Percent, we want to introduce you to the elite among the gang of the superrich: the war profiteers. Help give your local Occupy group the tools they need to fight corporate power by sharing our new video with them and posting it on your social networks.
War industry CEOs make tens of millions of dollars a year, putting them in the top 0.01 percent of income earners in the U.S.
Northrop Grumman CEO Wes Bush made $22.84 million last year.
Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens made $21.89 million.
Boeing CEO James McNerney: $19.4 million.
These guys use their corporations’ massive lobbying dollars to keep their job-killing gravy train rolling. Last year, their companies spent a whopping $46 million on lobbying, corrupting our politics and ensuring that their bank accounts continue to fatten at our expense. These executives are some of the main reasons why we're wasting so much on war instead of rebuilding our own nation here at home.
We have been deeply inspired by the incredible activism of the Occupy movement, so we created this new video to help highlight a piece of their messaging that's essential to getting our country back on track: We have to end wars for profit.
Help us expose these war profiteers for what they are: the 0.01 Percent. Find your local Occupy group on Facebook and ask them to show our latest video at their events and on their Livestreams. Then, visit our Facebook page to tell us how it went!
Sincerely,
Derrick Crowe, Robert Greenwald and the Brave New Foundation team
Brave New Foundation
10510 Culver Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
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